Page 14 - index

Today’s Real Estate Technology Leaders: Harnessing the Power of Technology and Innovation to Bring About Change
Robert Entin
EVP and CIO
Vornado Realty Trust
Robert Entin is an Executive Vice President and the Chief
Information Officer for Vornado Realty Trust, one of the nation’s
largest real estate investment trusts with ownership and
management of over 80 million SF of office, retail, residential, and Previously, they had been managed by an outside vendor which
hotel space. He is recognized and widely respected as a pioneer
in the real estate information solutions sector and has served as
Chairman and CTO for Integrated Business Systems (IBS), a well-
known provider of real estate automation solutions, which he
founded in 1979.
Highlights of 2014
The past year was a whirlwind. We did a spinoff of our strip retail
properties into a new public company, Urban Edge Properties
(www.uedge.com). This was a major part of Vornado’s mission
to simplify and refocus the business. The new company has a
separate CEO and board, allowing it to focus 100% of its efforts
on the growth and development of the retail portfolio. From the
IT perspective, we had to create an entirely new infrastructure
and separate entity—from building a data center, provisioning
the servers, creating their own network, relicensing a wide
variety of products, and then migrating their data. To add to the
complexity, some of the migration was very time-sensitive. At
launch, we only had a few days to make everything happen. And
while it was in essence a clone and purge procedure, some of the
data is not readily identifiable by asset, in which case it was not
immediately clear who owns the data. To comply with strict data
governance rules, we had to parse through and assign almost
a million documents stored in our document management
repository. We of course were able to automate a substantial
amount of that, but it was still a lot of work. In the end, the “IT
separation” of Urban Edge went very well.
Another significant project was the continued integration of
our business intelligence warehouse with the budgeting and
reporting process. The detailed level of budgeting we do at
Vornado (not unlike others) makes this probably the most com-
plicated process we do each year. The “last mile” of the process
is the creation of very complicated schedules that end up in our
budget book; the number of schedules is astounding. They’re
typically done in Excel so they can be customized by accountants
to create the pixel perfect reports they need. The schedules
need lots of GAAP financial data throughout (EBITDA, NOI, FFO,
etc.), which if calculated within the spreadsheet, creates risk. To
solve this, we implemented a much tighter integration between
the warehouse and our core accounting system. We created a
widget that reads the financial statement formats and formulas
from the core system, integrates data from a variety of sources,
homogenizes the data, and pre-calculates and stores financial
statement results in the warehouse. The system allows for easy
12 Realcomm
mixing and matching of data sources and supports the portfolio
consolidation configuration from the core system to match our
SEC and other consolidations. The process is remarkably more
efficient and saves a considerable amount of man hours.
A third item we spent time on and had accomplishments in was
consolidating the management of the IP backbones supporting
the building management systems (BMS) in our NY buildings.
more and more is construed to represent a security risk. Outside
of the security concern, it is better operationally for our staff to
manage this network within the scope of the Vornado network.
We’ve now brought this in-house under IT’s governance where
we have control and can be certain they are properly secured.
Security has to be a number one concern right now. All of the
CIOs I talk to regularly are in the same boat. You’d have to live on
Mars not to have cyber security as a major concern.
Plans for 2015
Since I don’t live on Mars, a big part of our IT strategy for 2015
involves continuing
the fortification of
the infrastructure.
We plan to add
several sophisticated
detection tools into
the network and
increase encryption
in areas where
warranted. I’m
not confident the
average organization
thoroughly
understands where data is collected at every point in their
enterprise, where it is stored, and most importantly, how and
when it’s disposed. You can’t have an intelligent encryption
program until you know what and where to encrypt. A more
formal data classification exercise is on our horizon this year. This
has to be viewed as a continuous process to be effective.
We’re also looking at implementing predictive analysis protec-
tion tools. As we know, most companies that have had their data
hacked didn’t know it for several months, some much longer. A
high percentage of security breaches are also not detected by
the company itself, but rather by an outsider—a law enforcement
agency, a partner, or a vendor. The latest, leading-edge security
products now focus on analyzing big data (network activity) and
use predictive analysis to find patterns of anomalous behav-
ior, helping detect rogue activity hopefully before it becomes
dangerous.
On the BMS side, we will continue to expand the data points
that are being collected in the buildings. We’ve been collecting
electricity and usage data for years. Various other components,
like chiller/damper information, HVAC box statuses, etc., are